Re: Some comments on the user agent guidelines

Jamal Mazrui wrote:
> 
> The following is my input on the "last call" working draft of the
> W3C's user agent accessibility guidelines:

Hi Jamal,

Thank you for the suggested techniques. Some comments below:

> *    When applicable (such as with a computer based browser),
> provide a mechanism for downloading a batch of links to the
> current page.  It is common for a user to want several linked
> pages downloaded, yet most browsers today require that each link
> be visited and separately downloaded.  An example would be a
> dialog that includes a listbox of file extensions representing
> files linked to the current web page.  The user could select one,
> multiple, or all of the extensions to be downloaded in an
> automated process.  The file names would be the same or closest
> equivalents on the user's computer in a directory/folder that
> could be chosen in another control of the dialog.  An enhanced
> option would place all downloaded files in a compressed archive
> using an industry standard format (such as the public domain .zip
> one).

For which checkpoint is this a technique? How exactly would this
work?

1) If you say "Download the current page and everything it links
to recursively" you may get the whole Web on your hard drive...
You might do the following:

1) Download the current page and any linked to it via LINK
2) Download all referenced images, objects, etc. (What about
   applets?)
3) Don't download resources linked by  <A href..>

2) If you spend time identifying each page you want to download
   and putting the URL in a list box, doesn't that amount
   to following the link as we do today?
 
> *    Support the resumption of partial downloads so that a time
> consuming but incomplete download is continued rather than
> restarted.

While extremely important, this feature does not seem to be 
an accessibility issue and my gut feeling is that it's out
of scope for this document.

I realize that anything that saves time can benefit accessibility.
Can you suggest important reasons while resumption of a download
benefits accessibility?

Thanks Jamal!

 - Ian

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Sunday, 5 December 1999 13:44:05 UTC